Oh No! Apple Pulled it Off!

[Just Plain Jeff]

Yesterday Apple Computer announced that's units with Intel chips would immediately be able to run Windows-based applications. Future Apple offerings for PC and laptops will be Intel based as well, opening up Apple products to use the full range of PC-based applications.

At noon yesterday, Apple stock was up 1%.

Now we'll have to figure out how to use those gizmos since Adam and Eve, well, that's another story.

[Ben]

I think you had a typo... Apple's stock went up by 10% on the first day.

This is good news for Apple (since they can sell more Macs) and Microsoft (since you have to own a copy of their OS) and bad news for all PC hardware manufacturers (because they now have more competition).

Also, check this out...

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/04/06/parallels-windows-virtualization-beta/#comments

It claims that you can run Windows at close to native speeds in a window on the Mac which would be much better than Apple's solution since you wouldn't have to re-boot and could be running both OSes at the same time!

[Just Plain Jeff]

No, it wasn't a typo, up 1% by noon; it took awhile for people to get to their brokers by the end of the day.

This is quite an interesting development by Apple. There had been numerous attempts to create cross-platform capabilities even way back in the XT days. (You may be too young to remember that). There were proposals to run Apple-like applications on PCs, that failed; there were 3rd party ideas of separate machines, but Apple killed those, as their hardware/software were proprietary and they wouldn't provide source code for their OS. Scully wanted to open it up but Wozniak wouldn't stand for it. Pepsi against geeks, I guess.

So, finally Apple does it themselves.

You can read much more about the original encounters in my new book, hopefully out this summer. :D